Popular online event site Eventbrite has raised $6.5 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. The company has confirmed the funding, and says Sequoia Capital is the new investor. Sequoia partner Roelof Botha joins the board of directors. Both Roelof and Sequoia backed Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz’s previous startup, Xoom.
This brings the event site’s total funding to over $8 million. Previous big-name investors include Bebo co-founder Michael Birch, Jeff Clavier, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, and Flixster co-founder Saran Chari.
Eventbrite provides online event management and ticketing services for any type of event. Eventbrite is free if your event is free. If you sell tickets to your event, Eventbrite collects 2.5% of the ticket price plus $0.99 per ticket sold.
The startup competes in a crowded space, which includes Amiando and TicketLeap. But the startup’s model has proven to be popular for event organizers. In fact, TechCrunch uses Eventbrite for many of our events.
These guys have built a pretty solid service so far. It should be interesting to see where they innovate in this space, especially following ConstantContact’s recent launch of event management software.
I’m surprised there’s no mention of constantcontact’s formidable entrance into this market
Agreed. Eventbrite appears to have a broader user base compared to who ConstantContact is targeting, but they clearly overlap. Eventbrite has a great user interface. Haven’t tried CC yet.
For this user, Eventbrite is a pretty neat service. Glad to see them get this infusion.
Any information on what they want to do with that money? I thought they were already cash positive.
Just wondering, does Pud have anything to do with EventBrite or is the similarity of names to adBrite a coincidence?
Eventbrite is a phenomenal platform and has consistently been for years.
Here’s to hoping that this capital will give them an army that can finally take a run at Ticketmaster’s so-absurd-they-should-be-illegal margins.
I was using Eventbrite for few years for my events, very good service. Recently switched to Eventbee as they got flat $1 fee model and deep integration into social networks. We are happy with Eventbee so far, but we will see what innovation Eventbrite brings to the market, hope they change the pricing to flat $1 model like Eventbee!
Eventbee Employee, nice try.
Stupid spammer: http://twitter....arch?q=eventbee
yes, noticed eventbrite spam messages, http://search.t...h?q=eventrocker
yes, saw eventbrite spam, http://twitter.com/eventrocker
i’ve been an Eventbrite user for years, done over 30 conferences & monthly dinner events using the service, and it rocks the house.
congrats Kevin & team, and smart move Roelof
Solid product and team. Congrats Kevin!
Congrats, Kevin!!! I am looking forward to hearing you speak in about ten days at NextGen Conference!
http://www.next....eventbrite.com – I love EventBrite!
Good for them. Eventbrite is great. Seems like everyone’s using it these days.
Check out the Eventbrite <3 MailChimp campaign:
http://www.mail...ign/eventbrite/
Congrats Eventbrite!
Rick
Founder – Ettend
http://www.ettend.com
Event Management Software
If you do the numbers for tickets priced $10, $15, $20, $25 and $30, the average customer fee using the 2.5% + 99c formula works out at on average 13.77% per ticket (14.90%, 13.27%, 13.08%, 13.46%, and 14.13% per ticket respectively). This isn’t dissimilar to the prices charged by the incumbent ticket agencies to customers at the moment.
Also, in many cases a proportion of those fees are paid back to the rights holder such as venue or promoter so a reduction in revenue would act as a disincentive to change to such a service.
There is also a processing fee of 3% credit card fee or 1.9%-2.9% + 30c (for PayPal or Google Checkout) for rights holders.
If a customer bought a ticket for the 5 prices listed above, Eventbrite would generate an average fee per ticket (from the combined buyer and seller) of 19.77% (20.90%, 19.27%, 19.08%, 19.46% and 20.13% per ticket respectively).
Splitting a near 20% fee between the buyer and seller makes the service cheaper to both but won’t be sustainable in the long run, especially when booking fees are included in the price of the ticket so the rights holder will take on all these costs.
Mark
Are you comparing Ticketmaster to eventbrite?
New York TImes is – http://bits.blo...?ref=technology
It is indeed a crowded field. I ran an event marketing and registration service for 4 years, which we eventually shut down. It’s a hard business to gain traction in b/c the margins are very low per sale.
Eventbrite has executed flawlessly building a very simple self service system. They were going nowhere for a little while and were nothing more than a ticketing engine on top of Paypal for awhile. It seemed like it was on life support. Then, they came back and shot to the moon.
There are a bunch of players in this space that have been around for a lot longer and have decent businesses. Regonline, Acteva, Cvent. I believe that eventbrite is cheaper than them, though. And unless they’ve simplified their interface, eventbrite offers a bit less bells and whistles, but much simpler to use for simpler events.
As a result of all of this, eventbrite has stolen the momentum in the marketplace.
Constant Contact just entered the space which should make it interesting.
Peter,
I’m comparing the fees charged by both parties. 20% to the value of the ticket is pretty punchy and I would question how sustainable those levels are for both Ticketmaster and Evenbrite.
Ticketmaster can vary from 10% to 25% on average though there are always exceptions on both the low and high end of that range.
I don’t disagree in terms of the system that they have built, but for event tickets (not conferences) they are charging comparative fees as the incumbents without sharing the revenue generated like Tickemaster do.
Venues sign up to Ticketmaster because primarily they participate in any sevice revenue generated and secondly it takes alot of hassle off their hands. If Eventbrite does neither of these things, then they won’t take market share from the incumbent players.
Congrats Team Evenbrite! Awesome service. Even better people behind it.
congrats to eventbrite on raising money, kevin can use some money to stop customer migration to us, and keep servers live
people underestimate us because of our $1 FLAT pricing model, in reality we are disrupting this space, we are the biggest halloween ticketing guys in SF (http://halloween.eventbee.com)
we are always one step ahead in innovating things, google us to find following
- top 10 fb connect app
- adsense for events
- only ticketing provider, that has native app presence in Facebook and Ning
by the way we don’t have pressure from any VC to skyrocket our revenues!
Yeah, you’re really big, bee: http://siteanal...m+eventbee.com/
keep checking that link every month